167: Healing and Helping with Mutual Aid with Dean Spade

In this conversation with Dean Spade we resolve a long-running challenge in my understanding: when we talked with Dr. john powell on the topic of Othering and Belonging a couple of years ago we discussed how volunteering promotes othering, because it perpetuates the idea that the volunteer is a person with resources to give, and the recipient has little in the way of useful knowledge or resources of their own.  Dr. powell agreed, but we didn’t have time to discuss what to do instead.

In this episode we finally punch out that lingering hanging chad of knowledge and talk with Dean Spade about the concept of mutual aid, which is the topic of his book: Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity in This Crisis (And The Next).  In this conversation we discuss:

What is mutual aid, and how it’s more effective than volunteering

How we heal in community with others from the effects that benign-seeming systems like capitalism have on us

Ways to find and get involved in mutual aid projects

As Dean and I talked, I also realized how applicable these ideas are to the work I do with parents in the Taming Your Triggers workshop.  

It’s not surprising that parents feel triggered by their child’s behavior when you consider the trauma that we’ve experienced.  Even if you had ‘good parents,’ they still raised you to succeed within a system that told you to hide unacceptable parts of yourself so you could be ‘successful’ - which means getting good grades, going to college, getting a good job, buying a house, and raising a family.  And we’re supposed to do all of this by ourselves, without relying on others - because then we’ll need to buy more stuff along the journey.

Our culture uses shame to enforce these rules and keep us in line - that’s why we feel a sense of wrong-ness when we do something that isn’t socially acceptable - like asking for help, for example.

Because these traumas happened in community, they’re most effectively healed in community as well - just as these two parents did when they built on each other’s knowledge in the workshop earlier this year (screenshot shared with permission):

If you want to jump-start your ability to actually apply that knowledge in your interactions with your children by learning in community with others, then Taming Your Triggers will help you.

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Dr. Dean Spade's Book

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